30.11.02

29.11.02

Eve Andree Laramee: I am curious about issues of authorship, the relationship between the artist and the institution. Currently I am developing a long-term performance project, Secret History, which began in 1997 and has had numerous permutations. At its inception, I conceived of it as a self-experiment on identity.______ I presented the work as a historical exhibition, complete with wall text and chronological organization, and positioned myself as the curator. I gave tours of the exhibition and fielded questions from viewers about the work. I invented documents and made photographs in which I dressed as other people. I produced hundreds of works through a fictional character, mostly works on paper, small sculptures and devices, as well as paintings

The character I invented, Yves Fissiault, was an electrical engineer (and secret artist) during the Cold War, involved in the aerospace industry for the Defense Department. He hid his artistic practice for fear of what his conservative employers might think. Fissiault was an amalgamation of a character from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and facts taken from my personal imagining of my father, who had also been an electrical engineer during the Cold War and whom I last saw when I was five years old. I have strong associations with Pynchon, whom I love for many reasons, including the way he interweaves historical fact with outrageous, ass-kicking absurdity

In this piece, two hundred creatures cast in silicone and suspended in translucent oil are trapped within illuminated glass jars suspended from the ceiling of a darkened room. Although many are purposely ugly, the complete environment is eerily beautiful and haunting. Each creature whirs around in its liquid light-filled medium emitting chirps and snippets of song. When any individual jar is approached, the creature inside clams up and stops moving, seemingly in fright, and becomes a dead, sterile "specimen."

As a child she preferred the company of other mischievous children, and teetered on the edge of delinquency from age five on. Simultaneously, however, she showed such promise as an artist that other children were stealing her paintings and trying to pawn them off as their own.

27.11.02

26.11.02

25.11.02

Seeing and BelievingThe art of Nancy BursonBeginning in the early 1980s—when digital graphics were still in their infancy and long before software for morphing became easily obtainable—Burson produced a series of computer-generated composite portraits in collaboration with programmers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, who were then working at the Computer Corporation of America. The program created an average of several images by mapping facial coordinates and then finding their mean. Burson's attitude toward science is often steeped in irony, and her composites challenge earlier attempts to classify human physiognomies by such "scientists" as the eighteenth-century Swiss phrenologist Johann Kaspar Lavater and the Victorian anthropologist Sir Francis Galton—who was Darwin's cousin, the founder of eugenics, and the first to enlist composite photography in the now-discredited campaign to establish links between appearance, intelligence, and racial superiority____________As a visual experiment, Burson combined the faces of six men and six women, attempting to see which gender would dominate. She found that if you cover the mouth, the face appears more feminine. Like Mankind (1983–85), which is hanging nearby, this digital composite visualizes both popular fantasies and fears about what happens when genetic material mixes across race and gender. _____________Burson's photographs of healers challenge the average skeptic. Surely the halo surrounding one healer must be a peculiar refraction of light coming in through the window? Not so, insists the artist. This is the real thing, and nothing will shake her certainty.__________In the mid-1990s, Burson refined her ideas about the relative nature of beauty in a series of large-scale Polaroids. Instead of conforming to standard cultural ideals of attractiveness, the individuals in these photographs have faces altered by cancer, reconstructive surgery, or prostheses. In a world saturated with mass-produced fantasies of flawless beauty, Burson's warm, intimate Polaroid portraits—which often include other family members—ask us to reconsider our dreams of perfection and to confront our own vulnerability and mortality___________Warhead

Emira and I attended a solo violin recital by Maxim Vengerov last night. This was a rare kind of performance — he performed “without a net,” as the promotional copy claimed, i.e. with no accompaniment (piano or otherwise).

I am at an utter loss for words to describe the sublime nature of this man’s gift. I can only say that the performance left me breathless, grasping for a new vocabulary with which to contemplate beauty. I never knew that a performer could be so focused, so perfectly in the moment, so virtuosic and, for lack of a better word, musical at once.

At the risk of sounding completely over the top: I feel like I was in the room with an angel last night. Totally awe-struck; on the verge of (joyful) tears; ready to go out into the world with new eyes and ears.

And I never say out loud to them that my dear old people
Are columns of earth, walk around, sit in chairs,
discard cigarettes and write that's left of poems.
They were low lights between mountains visible
To the evening gaze, they were evaporate mornings,
They are not much but stones in the earth.......

______________

Beginning November 12, 2002,
George Bowering has been appointed
as the first Canadian resident poet to
Parliament Hill for a two year term.__________________ As Wah would say, I like the shift. It is an Olsonian shift if you look at it closely enough. By the sacred we mean things that we have envalued in spiritual terms. No matter how sincere we are, we still place our spiritual needs first. We are likely to remain humanists. We are likely to be at best Wordsworthian priests of nature, with all the egotistical sublime that entails. Olson called it "sprawl."

24.11.02

The result was an electrifying combination of old and new, with Robin increasingly exploring a more autobiographical vein in his songwriting. The Merry Band made three unforgettable albums Journey’s Edge, American Stonehenge and A Glint At The Kindling during their brief career; a live recording of their final performance in 1979 has only just been released. Better late than never, for sure. Glint ‘s centrepiece was the mighty Five Denials On Merlin’s Grave, which laid the foundations for Robin’s later 'Bardic' style, combining music and the spoken word in a potent distillation of the Celtic soul.

Since the ending of the Merry Band Robin has worked almost exclusively as a soloist, settling again in Britain in the mid-Eighties. Over this period he has released 29 recordings of songs, instrumental music and spoken word pieces. Latterly, he has come to excell in a form of music that cunningly blends all three elements, and in which the Celtic harp is the principal instrument. This has led to his being dubbed a 20th Century Bard; in fact, this is a pretty servicable description, for all its air of Victorian romanticism, as he has drawn consistently on ancient Celtic poetry and stories throughout his career. Perhaps more than any other contemporary musician, he has achieved a graceful synthesis of ancient and modern, in which each complements and infuses the other. His most recent album of original songs, The Island Of The Strong Door, shows this to stunning effect.

The ISB were recently described in a work of rock journalism as 'now all-but- forgotten'. It’s true that they have been largely ignored by the rock nostalgia industry that has cast its cyclopean shadow over the Nineties music scene, but their influence in the development of popular music is ungainsayable and a number of rock luminaries have recently stepped forward to acknowledge that fact, including Neil Tennant, Bill Drummond of KLF, The Cure’s Porl Thompson, and Robert Plant. 'The Incredible String Band were an inspiration and a sign,' said Planty, who also remarked of Robin’s unique vocal style 'If you don’t sing like Robin Williamson when you’re 19, you’re never going to sing like Robin Williamson.'

Muzsikás has performed with goatskin bagpipes, the hammered-dulcimer-like cymbalom, and regional string inventions the kontra and the hit-gardon. The kontra, popular in Transylvania, is a violin-shaped, three-stringed instrument with a flat bridge for uniform chords and triads. The cello-sized hit-gardon, from the East Carpathians, is a percussion instrument whose four gut strings are struck with a wooden stick or slapped on the fingerboard--definitely not regulation Suzuki bow position.